Sunday, November 16, 2014

I'm proud to post that the exhibition catalog for our San Francisco photography show is now available on Blurb as an e-book or print on demand. Tom Griscom and Wendy Crittenden's photos look beautiful.

The show is opening Thursday 4/2 5-7pm at the Special Collections Gallery on the 4th floor of the library at San Francisco State University. Tom & Wendy are scheduled to talk about their work at 6pm.

Denis Kitchen: Feels good, Kim! Especially after winning the two awards for our debut title. It also felt good to have that material finally be reprinted after literally 40 years. I also have to add how gracious and enthused Stan Lee was about this experimental material. He went way out on a limb back in 1974. I’m astonished what us hippie cartoonists got away with on Marvel’s dime! See More at CA

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

My husband Marc Greenberg & I were blown away when one of our favorite artists, Darick Robertson, told us that he featured Marc as the big bad super-villain Maxwell Vanderbilt of Big Dick Industries (Sex & Crime & Rock N Roll). He is revealed as the bad-guy-in-chief in Black Mask's Ballistic #4, and meets with a nasty (but colorful) demise in Ballistic #5. Now Marc is immortal! Thanks Darick!

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

On October 10th, Marc and I saw Wordless!, a presentation on wordless novels by Art Spiegelman in collaboration with jazz composer Phillip Johnston and a 6 man jazz band (including Johnson on soprano sax). Spiegelman began the evening speaking about the concepts that make comics work, and the odd marriage of word & image, and then continued with animated slideshows of works by artists telling stories without words accompanied by Johnston and the band. In many ways, it felt very much like a series of short silent films with musical accompaniment and narrative interludes. The featured artists were A.B. Frost; Frans Masereel; H.M. Bateman; Lynd Ward; Otto Nückel; Milt Gross; Si Lewen and Wilhelm Busch, plus Spiegelman’s own work. We saw this show at Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley; at this time the show is continuing to tour (see dates here).

I was happy to hear about this show, as it coincided with my own curiosity about Giacomo Patri’s White Collar (1940), a depression era story told in woodcuts, which the Labor Archives and Research Center currently has on display at the SFSU library. While the influence of 19th Century and German Expressionist woodcuts was obvious, I struggled a bit with putting this work in larger context. Spiegelman’s presentation and David A. Beronä’s excellent survey book Wordless Books: the Original Graphic Novels have really helped in this regard, giving me both an overview of the genre and the characteristics of the work. While there is some humorous work, generally it seems that topics like morality, war, and social injustice motivated prolific artists like Franz Masereel and Lynd Ward to spend endless hours physically carving images into blocks of wood.

Spiegelman began his presentation by filling the audience in on his background between puffs on an e-cigarette (“I’m a nervous New Yorker” he said, peering over the podium). Many of the images used in this segment would be familiar to anyone who has read Breakdowns or has seen him speak before. He spoke about the literary importance of comics (covered in detail on Paris Review), and then got into the meat of the evening’s topic. He explained his need to develop a visual storytelling style that would be appropriate for telling his family story, and that he found himself attracted to the bold lines of the woodcut novels. When he was 22, he met Lynd Ward at a gallery opening, and upon asking Ward what comics he read, was surprised to learn that Ward’s father, a Methodist minister, had forbidden the funnies, and that the biblical engravings of Gustave Doré were Ward’s main inspiration. Spiegelman still found inspiration in Ward’s work, incorporating elements of the Expressionist woodcut style into Prisoner from Hell Planet, the harrowing story of his mother’s suicide.

Art Spiegelman. Prisoner from Hell Planet, Pages 3 & 4

After this story, his presentation of the artists and their works began in earnest. “Don’t worry if you get a little lost while you’re watching,” he told us. “I’m hoping you will careen between my words and these picture stories until you’re left as breathlessly unbalanced as I am.” As the slideshow of artist's work unfolded, I found myself slipping into an unconscious understanding of the imagery as I tried to follow the thread of unspoken narrative, helped along by Johnston’s musical interpretations. It’s one thing to hold these books in your hands and puzzle over their content alone, it’s another to see them as a performance and puzzle over their sometimes abstract content with the rest of the audience. The band had its best moment during the closing piece, a new work by Spiegelman called Shaping Thought (there's a bit of it in the trailer above), that emphasized the best qualities of both the musicians and the cartoonist, a true collaborative effort. The historical segments on Masereel and Ward were the core of show; the innovators who established the elements of the genre that everyone else would follow in one way or another, and I found myself truly intrigued by their work.

Franz Masereel. Two plates from Passionate Journey (1919)

Frans Masereel (1889-1972) had a life-long devotion to the woodcut medium. Between the publication of his first portfolio in 1917 and his death in 1972, Masereel created numerous book illustrations and over 50 wordless books. He grew up in a middle class family in Ghent, Belgium, and he moved to Geneva at the beginning of WWI, were he worked for the International Red Cross and the International Pacifist Movement. He became a political cartoonist, and throughout his life he depicted the brutality of war, the dehumanization resulting from the industrial revolution, and the complexities of everyday city life in his novels and illustrations. The line work and composition of Masereel’s work remind me very much of Goya’s engravings (particularly the Disasters of War series) and the work of Masereel’s contemporary Käthe Kollwitz, who frequently created woodcuts commenting on similar themes of war and labor strife. Spiegelman choose to show sequences from Passionate Journey (1919) and The City (1925), both works that show the joys and tragedies of relationships and city life.

Franz Masereel. Two plates from The City (1925)

Although not included in the show, this plate from Masereel's 1952 book Notre Temps is typical of his work on the theme of war and poverty. The confining lines of the barbed wire and the strong lines of stakes contrast strongly with the horizontal lines of the background, giving the reader insight into the despair of the man in the center.

Franz Masereel. Plate from Notre Temps (1952)

Käthe Kollwitz. Memorial Sheet to Karl Liebknecht. 1919.

Käthe Kollwitz. The Volunteers, 1923.

Lynd Ward (1905-1985) was directly inspired by Masereel’s wordless novel The Sun (1919), which he discovered while spending a year abroad at the National Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzip, Germany in 1926. He grew up in New York, and was a graduate of Columbia University. Dr. Harry Ward, the father who disapproved of comics, was a writer, social activist, and the first board Chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Lynd inherited his father’s passion for nature and activism, and brought those themes into his novels. Aside from his wordless novels, he was a prolific and successful book illustrator, winning both the Newberry and Caldecott Medals.

In 2010, Spiegelman edited a collection of six of Ward’s novels for the Library of America, so he was able to spend a chunk of time exploring Ward’s work. In the Wordless! Show, he focused on three of Ward’s novels:God’s Man (1929), a classic tale of an artist that makes a deal with the devil for fame and fortune, only to lose everything after becoming disillusioned with fame in the city and finding true love in a rural, natural setting.

Lynd Ward. Plate from God's Man, 1929.

Wild Pilgrimage (1932) is a depression era story that follows the challenges of a man that leaves a factory town, is educated by a hermit in the woods, and then returns to challenge and be killed by the factory guards. The real innovation in this book is Ward’s effort to show the man’s inner life, by printing pages of fantasy/thought sequences in orange, returning to regular black ink in the real world.

Lynd Ward. Two plates from Wild Pilgrimage, 1932.

Vertigo (1937), a 230 page book that Ward considered his masterpiece, is the story of a girl, a boy, and an elderly gentleman, and the way their lives cross in the course of their lives. As he follows the lives of the characters, Ward shows the injustices and indignities of the Depression.

Lynd Ward. Two plates from Vertigo, 1937.

Seeing these images adds another layer of meaning and complexity to Prisoner from Hell Planet. Spiegelman uses the lessons of the woodcut artists by utilizing the bold lines of the woodcut style. Lines and textures run in all directions, leaving the reader’s eye with nowhere to rest, a compositional choice that lends a sense of visual anxiety to this raw and heartbreaking story of guilt and tragedy. In the final two panels, the geometric grid of bars and jail cells enclose him. The regular lines seems strangely peaceful after the chaos of the previous panels, yet we feel that he will be trapped in there forever as he says "Congratulations! You've committed the perfect crime... you put me in here.. shorted all my circuits.. cut my nerve endings... and crossed my wires... you murdered me Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap."

I can also see why Spiegelman decided not to include White Collar in the show. Patri’s work,while it does have unique qualities of its own, did borrow a lot of ideas from Wild Pilgrimage: the orange printed pages of inner dialog, the occasional use of words on signage to make the meaning of a page clear, and the general theme of the injustices done to working people during the Depression era.

Since White Collar piqued my interest in wordless novels, I have recently found one or two others of interest; Combustion, a 1998 novel by Chris Lanier in which a solider at a protest watches a man light himself on fire, after which the solider gradually comes to sympathize with the enemy (very much in the Masereel tradition), and the Raven and the Red Ball, a light-hearted children's book featuring a game between a dog and a mischievous raven, which perfectly utilizes the woodcut style to show flight and movement.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Just posted on Comics Alternative are 3 of my capsule reviews on Comics Unmasked: Art & Anarchy in the UK by Gravett & Dunning, Comic Book People: Photographs from the 1970's and 1980's by Estrada, and an oldie but goodie, The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Eisner at http://comicsalternative.com/critical-takes-unmasked/

Monday, September 8, 2014

Cartoonist Carol Tyler has created a beautifully detailed art installation as her contribution to With or Without: Challenges, an art exhibition curated by Mary Heider for the Carnegie (Covington, KY), September 5 - November 1 2015. The show presents work created by artists as a way to process and address difficult life experiences or challenges in their lives. 17 artists are included in the exhibit, along with Tyler, and the Woebegone Basketry Guild.

Tyler's installation Pages from the Graphic Novel You'll Never Know is based on her graphic novel trilogy, You'll Never Know. Tyler devoted nine years of her life to telling the emotional story of her family, particularly her father, a World War II veteran suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), a condition that was formerly known as "soldier's heart."

When I asked her to explain the contents of the installation, Tyler told me, "What is on display is a recreation of my living/workspace for the past 9 years. I created You'll Never Know in the most humble space with no budget and in between care-giving duties, a job, and various other things, mainly health problems. What is seen here is one side of the room (the process) and then the other side is a sampling of the finished art. There are 23 pages on display. The other 350+ pages live in that box below the art that Dad & I made.

The following photos were taken by Carol to document the installation:

Panel explaining the installation

Recreation of Tyler's workspace, including her drawing board.

A display of pages from the books.

Justin Green creates signage.

Tyler and her daughter Julia.

Planning a sequence

Guest sign in book for Veterans.

Gallery visitor reading

The photo above, of a gallery visitor reading, holds special significance to Tyler, as she explains: 'The chair was meant to display the jacket from the book, but I love how this guy sat down and read all three books. He said he couldn't stop and that he was stunned and could he please come back during the week so he could look further (made me tearful)."

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Yesterday I viewed Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism (at the CJM SF through 10/6) a show about how European Jewish emigres networked together around a core of design institutions across the US, inspiring a new look for architecture, furniture, textiles, dinnerware & utensils, Judaica, and graphic design. The institutions singled out in the show were MoMA, Walker Art Center, Institute of Design (Chicago), Black Mountain College (NC), Case Study House/Art + Architecture magazine (LA), and Pond Farm (Guerneville, CA). There were many artists included in this survey and about 200 works on display; in this post, I am sharing examples of graphic design I found interesting (all photos by me). There's a detailed press release about the entire show on the CJM web site.

Entry to the exhibit. Focus is on the 1950's, 60's, & 70's

A display of album covers by Alex Steinweiss, 1950's

Book covers for Merdian and New Directions books by Elaine Lustig-Cohen, 1950's.

Book Cover by Alan Lustig, 1940's

Aviary, a wallpaper designed by Saul Steinberg

Saul Bass poses with his best-known poster, Anatomy of a Murder

Poster for No Way Out by Paul Rand, 1950

A wall of corporate logos designed by Paul Rand, Saul Bass, and Louis Danziger
between 1938 & 1980.

Also on view is Project Mah Jongg, which explored the game's roots and how it came to be an important pastime in Jewish American life. The thing I really liked about this show was the series of drawings by local artists describing their memories of how Mah Jongg was part of their personal family life and culture (through 10/28).

I contributed chapters on comics censorship and indie comics to this book, due to come out from Salem Press in November. It covers an impressive amount of territory and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's work. Order here.

I also contributed entries on Mort Walker and Beetle Bailey to the newly released 4 volume set from ABC-CLIO Greenwood Comics Through Time, which explores creators, titles and themes of importance from decade to decade.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

San Diego Convention Center. The white tents are
protecting the hours
long line to get into Hall H from the blazing sun. Photo by Kim Munson.

Here's a quick round up of panels and other happenings at San Diego Comic Con International:

At the Future of Geek panel moderated by John Siuntres (Word Balloon podcast), Heidi MacDonald (The Beat), Rob Salkowitz (Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture) and Tim Beyers (Motley Fool) expert industry watchers talked about the sudden increase of comics conventions around the country, and what this means to the comics industry.This was a fascinating panel, and a recording of it is available on the Word Balloon site.

This year marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Fredrick Wertham's infamous book Seduction of the Innocent, which provided an occasion to look back on an era of censorship that strangled the comics industry. The panel Sixty Years of Seduction: Rights, Wrong, and Wertham, hosted by Jeff Trexler (the Beat), managed a large and interested audience, despite a late Friday night time slot. Scenes from Sequart's new documentary about Wertham, Diagram for Delinquents (above) were shown by its director Robert A. Emmons, Jr, who was joined by Brandford W. Wright (Comic Book Nation), Carol Tilley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and two psychiatrists, Vasilis K. Pozios, MD and Praveen R. Kambam, MD. The panel discussed Wertham's history and influences, his methodology, his campaign against comics and his legacy. A lively discussion about comics and violence followed. This panel is available almost verbatim on Bleeding Cool.

It's always fun to get the annual update from J. Michael Straczynski, this year he told us about Joe's Comics (through Image), a comics reboot of the Twilight Zone (Dynamite), a new volume of Superman (DC) and an endless stream of film and TV projects, including his new Netflix series Sense8 with the Wachowskis. He also told us that he might finally be doing a Babylon 5movie (yay!) and that he forged his records in order to graduate from high school. It's always something...

JMS presents new projects. Photo by Kim Munson.

Art panels are always my favorites, and this year did not disappoint. One of the most interesting panels (to me) was Temple of Art, a documentary about collaboration and the creative process featuring the work of 52 different artists. Among the artists on this HUGE panel were Grant Morrison ("I paint with words"), Bill Sienkiewicz, Barron Storey and Dave Mckean.

I'm always happy to add fun pages to our ever growing collection! This year I bought a great page from "The Slobbit" a MAD Magazine spoof drawn by Tom Richmond. That's the devious and dangerous dragon Smaug in the nose and glasses. Richmond was very nice, and was sitting at the National Cartoonist Society booth with Greg Evans, and his daughter Karen, the real Luann.

MAD's Tom Richmond. Photo by Kim Munson.

Sunday, after the annual meeting of the church of Jack Kirby, which this year included one of my favorite oddballs, artist Scott Shaw!, was one of my favorite panels, Cover Story: Art of the Cover. In this session moderated by Mark Evanier, 5 well-known artists talk about the success, failure and challenges of 5 different cover images from projects done throughout the course of their careers. The artists do not see these images ahead of time, and are often surprised by the selection. They talked about the difficulties of having to produce a relevant cover months before the script for a comic is even written, and the challenge of finding a fresh take on an established character. Artists included Mark Brooks (New X-Men); Amanda Connor (Power Girl, Harley Quinn); Fiona Staples (Saga); Jae Lee (Before Watchmen) and Stan Sakai (Usagi Dojimbo). CBR has posted an almost verbatim report on this panel, including images.

As usual, the Comic Arts Conference, an academic conference within and in conjunction with San Diego Comic-Con International, offered a heaping platter of scholarly goodness. Several panels and presentations really stood out to me this year.

Marc Greenberg, author of Comic Art, Creativity and the Law (my husband) and Rob Salkowitz, author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, talked about what the potential future of comics might look like, and the legal complexities of the models they identified. They discussed corporate comics, indie comics, crowd funding, retail and digital sales, and many other topics, based on the four projections laid out in Rob's book and continued in Marc's.

It seemed to me that all four concepts have been happening simultaneously: the "Endless Summer" scenario, in which major corporations maximize the possibilities of their intellectual property and their audience; "Ghost World," in which the audience tires of the mainstream, and artists and indie publishers succeed in offering grassroots alternatives; "Infinite Crisis," in which a passionate but dwindling pool of fans and collectors support specialty retail, and the "Expanding Multiverse," in which a more diverse and global creator population harness the web, mobile, games and other platforms to tell their stories.

Rob Salkowitz and Marc Greenberg after their panel. Photo by Kim Munson.

Following Marc and Rob's panel was a brilliant panel on British Comics, many unique to the UK titles like Misty, Doctor Who, and Judge Dread, and how their Golden Age comics borrowed (or outright copied) elements and characters from popular US comics.

Down on the exhibit floor, CAC regular Trina Robbins was at the Fantagraphics booth signing Pretty in Ink, her ultimate take on the "herstory" of women cartoonists. One of Trina's finest moments was her rediscovery of Lily Renee, an influential cartoonist of the WW2 era with an amazing story (read The Golden Age of Lily Renee here). Lily, who is 91, flew in from New York for a day of signing at the booth.

Lily Renee and Trina Robbins at the Fantagraphics booth. Photo by Marc Greenberg.

I enjoyed a presentation on Bill Hume's Babysan comics by historian R.C. Harvey and the final wrap-up panel of presentations by students of Matthew J. Smith on fan studies and marketing. Most of these students had never been to SDCC before, and it is always interesting to see the convention anew through their observations.

There were many panels and displays celebrating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Batman. Dean Trippe, author of Something Terrible spoke with Tommy Cash about how reading Batman rescued him from the mental anguish of childhood abuse (one page version here, you can buy the entire comic for 99 cents).

Here's a blurry photo of the whole
tribe at the Who Created Batman? panel.
Photo by Kim Munson.

On the all-star panel Who Created Batman?, scholars and family representatives had a lively debate over who actually did create Batman, presenting panel art from Golden Age comics, research and anecdotal evidence to try to piece together how much of the creation of Batman could be attributed to Bob Kane, and how much to his collaborators Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson. To the surprise of no one, the conclusion was that Kane's claim of total ownership was probably exaggerated, and that Finger was the real brains behind the operation, joined later by Robinson. Panelists included Moderator Travis Langley (Henderson State University); Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson (granddaughter of the original founder of DC Comics); Tom Andrae (Batman and Me); Athena Finger (Bill Finger estate); Marc Tyler Nobleman (Bill the Boy Wonder); Denny O'Neil (Batman); Brad Ricca (Super Boys); Jens Robinson (CartoonArts International); Arlen Schumer (arlenschumer.com) and Michael Uslan (Dark Knight film trilogy).

Down on the exhibit floor, DC had a huge Batman display that included cases of props from the films and a fascinating art project with Bat themed art painted on capes.

About Me

Art historian, author, artist and researcher living in the
SF Bay Area. Emphasis on works on paper and exhibitions, in particular comic art, law
& pop culture and labor graphics (union labels). Owner of Neurotic Raven, which recently published On Reflection: the Art of Margaret Harrison and Dual Views: Labor Landmarks of San Francisco.